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A few weeks ago, I came across a New Yorker article titled: “The Robot Caravan.” (The digital title is “Are Robots Competing for Your Job?”) The read is intriguing, even for someone like me who is not adept with tech. In summary, the story tells of the “coming invasion” of robots and A.I. — specifically, how these robots and programs will eventually put a sizable fraction of the American public out of work. Anders Sandberg, of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, says, “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated.” An impressive study from the University predicted that 47 percent of jobs in America are at risk of being replaced by robots and A.I. over the next fifteen to twenty years. Some research suggests that a quarter of US jobs are at high risk of automation. Mckinsey Global Institute, a management consulting firm, has estimated that by 2030, one-third of jobs in the global workforce face the risk of automation — thus displacing millions of people from what used to be their work. Another Oxford study outlines the jobs at risk of automation: library technicians, tax preparers, math technicians, telemarketers, cargo and freight agents, and insurance underwriters. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, the men who published this study, used (of course) an algorithm to estimate how easily…
